Chapter IV: An Awkward Friend

That night, Quasimodo did not sleep. He had just made his last
round of the church. He had not noticed, that at the moment when
he was closing the doors, the archdeacon had passed close to him
and betrayed some displeasure on seeing him bolting and barring
with care the enormous iron locks which gave to their large
leaves the solidity of a wall. Dom Claude’s air was even more
preoccupied than usual. Moreover, since the nocturnal adventure
in the cell, he had constantly abused Quasimodo, but in vain did
he ill treat, and even beat him occasionally, nothing disturbed
the submission, patience, the devoted resignation of the faithful
bellringer. He endured everything on the part of the archdeacon,
insults, threats, blows, without murmuring a complaint. At the
most, he gazed uneasily after Dom Claude when the latter ascended
the staircase of the tower; but the archdeacon had abstained from
presenting himself again before the gypsy’s eyes.

On that night, accordingly, Quasimodo, after having cast a glance
at his poor bells which he so neglected now, Jacqueline, Marie,
and Thibauld, mounted to the summit of the Northern tower, and
there setting his dark lanturn, well closed, upon the leads, he
began to gaze at Paris. The night, as we have already said, was
very dark. Paris which, so to speak was not lighted at that
epoch, presented to the eye a confused collection of black
masses, cut here and there by the whitish curve of the Seine.
Quasimodo no longer saw any light with the exception of one
window in a distant edifice, whose vague and sombre profile was
outlined well above the roofs, in the direction of the Porte
Sainte-Antoine. There also, there was some one awake.

As the only eye of the bellringer peered into that horizon of
mist and night, he felt within him an inexpressible uneasiness.
For several days he had been upon his guard. He had perceived men
of sinister mien, who never took their eyes from the young girl’s
asylum, prowling constantly about the church. He fancied that
some plot might be in process of formation against the unhappy
refugee. He imagined that there existed a popular hatred against
her, as against himself, and that it was very possible that
something might happen soon. Hence he remained upon his tower on
the watch, “dreaming in his dream-place,” as Rabelais says, with
his eye directed alternately on the cell and on Paris, keeping
faithful guard, like a good dog, with a thousand suspicions in
his mind.

All at once, while he was scrutinizing the great city with that
eye which nature, by a sort of compensation, had made so piercing
that it could almost supply the other organs which Quasimodo
lacked, it seemed to him that there was something singular about
the Quay de la Vieille-Pelleterie, that there was a movement at
that point, that the line of the parapet, standing out blackly
against the whiteness of the water was not straight and tranquil,
like that of the other quays, but that it undulated to the eye,
like the waves of a river, or like the heads of a crowd in
motion.

This struck him as strange. He redoubled his attention. The
movement seemed to be advancing towards the City. There was no
light. It lasted for some time on the quay; then it gradually
ceased, as though that which was passing were entering the
interior of the island; then it stopped altogether, and the line
of the quay became straight and motionless again.

At the moment when Quasimodo was lost in conjectures, it seemed
to him that the movement had re-appeared in the Rue du Parvis,
which is prolonged into the city perpendicularly to the façade of
Notre-Dame. At length, dense as was the darkness, he beheld the
head of a column debouch from that street, and in an instant a
crowd—of which nothing could be distinguished in the gloom except
that it was a crowd—spread over the Place.

This spectacle had a terror of its own. It is probable that this
singular procession, which seemed so desirous of concealing
itself under profound darkness, maintained a silence no less
profound. Nevertheless, some noise must have escaped it, were it
only a trampling. But this noise did not even reach our deaf man,
and this great multitude, of which he saw hardly anything, and of
which he heard nothing, though it was marching and moving so near
him, produced upon him the effect of a rabble of dead men, mute,
impalpable, lost in a smoke. It seemed to him, that he beheld
advancing towards him a fog of men, and that he saw shadows
moving in the shadow.

Then his fears returned to him, the idea of an attempt against
the gypsy presented itself once more to his mind. He was
conscious, in a confused way, that a violent crisis was
approaching. At that critical moment he took counsel with
himself, with better and prompter reasoning than one would have
expected from so badly organized a brain. Ought he to awaken the
gypsy? to make her escape? Whither? The streets were invested,
the church backed on the river. No boat, no issue!—There was but
one thing to be done; to allow himself to be killed on the
threshold of Notre-Dame, to resist at least until succor arrived,
if it should arrive, and not to trouble la Esmeralda’s sleep.
This resolution once taken, he set to examining the enemy with
more tranquillity.

The throng seemed to increase every moment in the church square.
Only, he presumed that it must be making very little noise, since
the windows on the Place remained closed. All at once, a flame
flashed up, and in an instant seven or eight lighted torches
passed over the heads of the crowd, shaking their tufts of flame
in the deep shade. Quasimodo then beheld distinctly surging in
the Parvis a frightful herd of men and women in rags, armed with
scythes, pikes, billhooks and partisans, whose thousand points
glittered. Here and there black pitchforks formed horns to the
hideous faces. He vaguely recalled this populace, and thought
that he recognized all the heads who had saluted him as Pope of
the Fools some months previously. One man who held a torch in one
hand and a club in the other, mounted a stone post and seemed to
be haranguing them. At the same time the strange army executed
several evolutions, as though it were taking up its post around
the church. Quasimodo picked up his lantern and descended to the
platform between the towers, in order to get a nearer view, and
to spy out a means of defence.

Clopin Trouillefou, on arriving in front of the lofty portal of
Notre-Dame had, in fact, ranged his troops in order of battle.
Although he expected no resistance, he wished, like a prudent
general, to preserve an order which would permit him to face, at
need, a sudden attack of the watch or the police. He had
accordingly stationed his brigade in such a manner that, viewed
from above and from a distance, one would have pronounced it the
Roman triangle of the battle of Ecnomus, the boar’s head of
Alexander or the famous wedge of Gustavus Adolphus. The base of
this triangle rested on the back of the Place in such a manner as
to bar the entrance of the Rue du Parvis; one of its sides faced
Hôtel-Dieu, the other the Rue Saint-Pierre-aux-Bœufs. Clopin
Trouillefou had placed himself at the apex with the Duke of
Egypt, our friend Jehan, and the most daring of the scavengers.

An enterprise like that which the vagabonds were now undertaking
against Notre-Dame was not a very rare thing in the cities of the
Middle Ages. What we now call the “police” did not exist then. In
populous cities, especially in capitals, there existed no single,
central, regulating power. Feudalism had constructed these great
communities in a singular manner. A city was an assembly of a
thousand seigneuries, which divided it into compartments of all
shapes and sizes. Hence, a thousand conflicting establishments of
police; that is to say, no police at all. In Paris, for example,
independently of the hundred and forty-one lords who laid claim
to a manor, there were five and twenty who laid claim to a manor
and to administering justice, from the Bishop of Paris, who had
five hundred streets, to the Prior of Notre-Dame des Champs, who
had four. All these feudal justices recognized the suzerain
authority of the king only in name. All possessed the right of
control over the roads. All were at home. Louis XI., that
indefatigable worker, who so largely began the demolition of the
feudal edifice, continued by Richelieu and Louis XIV. for the
profit of royalty, and finished by Mirabeau for the benefit of
the people,—Louis XI. had certainly made an effort to break this
network of seignories which covered Paris, by throwing violently
across them all two or three troops of general police. Thus, in
1465, an order to the inhabitants to light candles in their
windows at nightfall, and to shut up their dogs under penalty of
death; in the same year, an order to close the streets in the
evening with iron chains, and a prohibition to wear daggers or
weapons of offence in the streets at night. But in a very short
time, all these efforts at communal legislation fell into
abeyance. The _bourgeois_ permitted the wind to blow out their
candles in the windows, and their dogs to stray; the iron chains
were stretched only in a state of siege; the prohibition to wear
daggers wrought no other changes than from the name of the Rue
Coupe-Gueule to the name of the Rue-Coupe-Gorge[60] which is an
evident progress. The old scaffolding of feudal jurisdictions
remained standing; an immense aggregation of bailiwicks and
seignories crossing each other all over the city, interfering
with each other, entangled in one another, enmeshing each other,
trespassing on each other; a useless thicket of watches,
sub-watches and counter-watches, over which, with armed force,
passed brigandage, rapine, and sedition. Hence, in this disorder,
deeds of violence on the part of the populace directed against a
palace, a hôtel, or house in the most thickly populated quarters,
were not unheard-of occurrences. In the majority of such cases,
the neighbors did not meddle with the matter unless the pillaging
extended to themselves. They stopped up their ears to the musket
shots, closed their shutters, barricaded their doors, allowed the
matter to be concluded with or without the watch, and the next
day it was said in Paris, “Étienne Barbette was broken open last
night. The Marshal de Clermont was seized last night, etc.”
Hence, not only the royal habitations, the Louvre, the Palace,
the Bastille, the Tournelles, but simply seignorial residences,
the Petit-Bourbon, the Hôtel de Sens, the Hôtel d’Angoulême,
etc., had battlements on their walls, and machicolations over
their doors. Churches were guarded by their sanctity. Some, among
the number Notre-Dame, were fortified. The Abbey of
Saint-Germain-des-Prés was castellated like a baronial mansion,
and more brass expended about it in bombards than in bells. Its
fortress was still to be seen in 1610. To-day, barely its church
remains.

Let us return to Notre-Dame.

When the first arrangements were completed, and we must say, to
the honor of vagabond discipline, that Clopin’s orders were
executed in silence, and with admirable precision, the worthy
chief of the band, mounted on the parapet of the church square,
and raised his hoarse and surly voice, turning towards
Notre-Dame, and brandishing his torch whose light, tossed by the
wind, and veiled every moment by its own smoke, made the reddish
façade of the church appear and disappear before the eye.

“To you, Louis de Beaumont, bishop of Paris, counsellor in the
Court of Parliament, I, Clopin Trouillefou, king of Thunes, grand
Coësre, prince of Argot, bishop of fools, I say: Our sister,
falsely condemned for magic, hath taken refuge in your church,
you owe her asylum and safety. Now the Court of Parliament wishes
to seize her once more there, and you consent to it; so that she
would be hanged to-morrow in the Grève, if God and the outcasts
were not here. If your church is sacred, so is our sister; if our
sister is not sacred, neither is your church. That is why we call
upon you to return the girl if you wish to save your church, or
we will take possession of the girl again and pillage the church,
which will be a good thing. In token of which I here plant my
banner, and may God preserve you, bishop of Paris.”

Quasimodo could not, unfortunately, hear these words uttered with
a sort of sombre and savage majesty. A vagabond presented his
banner to Clopin, who planted it solemnly between two
paving-stones. It was a pitchfork from whose points hung a
bleeding quarter of carrion meat.

That done, the King of Thunes turned round and cast his eyes over
his army, a fierce multitude whose glances flashed almost equally
with their pikes. After a momentary pause,—“Forward, my Sons!” he
cried; “to work, locksmiths!”

Thirty bold men, square shouldered, and with pick-lock faces,
stepped from the ranks, with hammers, pincers, and bars of iron
on their shoulders. They betook themselves to the principal door
of the church, ascended the steps, and were soon to be seen
squatting under the arch, working at the door with pincers and
levers; a throng of vagabonds followed them to help or look on.
The eleven steps before the portal were covered with them.

But the door stood firm. “The devil! ’tis hard and obstinate!”
said one. “It is old, and its gristles have become bony,” said
another. “Courage, comrades!” resumed Clopin. “I wager my head
against a dipper that you will have opened the door, rescued the
girl, and despoiled the chief altar before a single beadle is
awake. Stay! I think I hear the lock breaking up.”

Clopin was interrupted by a frightful uproar which re-sounded
behind him at that moment. He wheeled round. An enormous beam had
just fallen from above; it had crushed a dozen vagabonds on the
pavement with the sound of a cannon, breaking in addition, legs
here and there in the crowd of beggars, who sprang aside with
cries of terror. In a twinkling, the narrow precincts of the
church parvis were cleared. The locksmiths, although protected by
the deep vaults of the portal, abandoned the door and Clopin
himself retired to a respectful distance from the church.

“I had a narrow escape!” cried Jehan. “I felt the wind, of it,
_tête-de-bœuf!_ but Pierre the Slaughterer is slaughtered!”

It is impossible to describe the astonishment mingled with fright
which fell upon the ruffians in company with this beam.

They remained for several minutes with their eyes in the air,
more dismayed by that piece of wood than by the king’s twenty
thousand archers.

“Satan!” muttered the Duke of Egypt, “this smacks of magic!”

“’Tis the moon which threw this log at us,” said Andry the Red.

“Call the moon the friend of the Virgin, after that!” went on
François Chanteprune.

“A thousand popes!” exclaimed Clopin, “you are all fools!” But he
did not know how to explain the fall of the beam.

Meanwhile, nothing could be distinguished on the façade, to whose
summit the light of the torches did not reach. The heavy beam lay
in the middle of the enclosure, and groans were heard from the
poor wretches who had received its first shock, and who had been
almost cut in twain, on the angle of the stone steps.

The King of Thunes, his first amazement passed, finally found an
explanation which appeared plausible to his companions.

“Throat of God! are the canons defending themselves? To the sack,
then! to the sack!”

“To the sack!” repeated the rabble, with a furious hurrah. A
discharge of crossbows and hackbuts against the front of the
church followed.

At this detonation, the peaceable inhabitants of the surrounding
houses woke up; many windows were seen to open, and nightcaps and
hands holding candles appeared at the casements.

“Fire at the windows,” shouted Clopin. The windows were
immediately closed, and the poor _bourgeois_, who had hardly had
time to cast a frightened glance on this scene of gleams and
tumult, returned, perspiring with fear to their wives, asking
themselves whether the witches’ sabbath was now being held in the
parvis of Notre-Dame, or whether there was an assault of
Burgundians, as in ’64. Then the husbands thought of theft; the
wives, of rape; and all trembled.

“To the sack!” repeated the thieves’ crew; but they dared not
approach. They stared at the beam, they stared at the church. The
beam did not stir, the edifice preserved its calm and deserted
air; but something chilled the outcasts.

“To work, locksmiths!” shouted Trouillefou. “Let the door be
forced!”

No one took a step.

“Beard and belly!” said Clopin, “here be men afraid of a beam.”

An old locksmith addressed him—

“Captain, ’tis not the beam which bothers us, ’tis the door,
which is all covered with iron bars. Our pincers are powerless
against it.”

“What more do you want to break it in?” demanded Clopin.

“Ah! we ought to have a battering ram.”

The King of Thunes ran boldly to the formidable beam, and placed
his foot upon it: “Here is one!” he exclaimed; “’tis the canons
who send it to you.” And, making a mocking salute in the
direction of the church, “Thanks, canons!”

This piece of bravado produced its effects,—the spell of the beam
was broken. The vagabonds recovered their courage; soon the heavy
joist, raised like a feather by two hundred vigorous arms, was
flung with fury against the great door which they had tried to
batter down. At the sight of that long beam, in the half-light
which the infrequent torches of the brigands spread over the
Place, thus borne by that crowd of men who dashed it at a run
against the church, one would have thought that he beheld a
monstrous beast with a thousand feet attacking with lowered head
the giant of stone.

At the shock of the beam, the half metallic door sounded like an
immense drum; it was not burst in, but the whole cathedral
trembled, and the deepest cavities of the edifice were heard to
echo.

At the same moment, a shower of large stones began to fall from
the top of the façade on the assailants.

“The devil!” cried Jehan, “are the towers shaking their
balustrades down on our heads?”

But the impulse had been given, the King of Thunes had set the
example. Evidently, the bishop was defending himself, and they
only battered the door with the more rage, in spite of the stones
which cracked skulls right and left.

It was remarkable that all these stones fell one by one; but they
followed each other closely. The thieves always felt two at a
time, one on their legs and one on their heads. There were few
which did not deal their blow, and a large layer of dead and
wounded lay bleeding and panting beneath the feet of the
assailants who, now grown furious, replaced each other without
intermission. The long beam continued to belabor the door, at
regular intervals, like the clapper of a bell, the stones to rain
down, the door to groan.

The reader has no doubt divined that this unexpected resistance
which had exasperated the outcasts came from Quasimodo.

Chance had, unfortunately, favored the brave deaf man.

When he had descended to the platform between the towers, his
ideas were all in confusion. He had run up and down along the
gallery for several minutes like a madman, surveying from above,
the compact mass of vagabonds ready to hurl itself on the church,
demanding the safety of the gypsy from the devil or from God. The
thought had occurred to him of ascending to the southern belfry
and sounding the alarm, but before he could have set the bell in
motion, before Marie’s voice could have uttered a single clamor,
was there not time to burst in the door of the church ten times
over? It was precisely the moment when the locksmiths were
advancing upon it with their tools. What was to be done?

All at once, he remembered that some masons had been at work all
day repairing the wall, the timber-work, and the roof of the
south tower. This was a flash of light. The wall was of stone,
the roof of lead, the timber-work of wood. (That prodigious
timber-work, so dense that it was called “the forest.”)

Quasimodo hastened to that tower. The lower chambers were, in
fact, full of materials. There were piles of rough blocks of
stone, sheets of lead in rolls, bundles of laths, heavy beams
already notched with the saw, heaps of plaster.

Time was pressing, The pikes and hammers were at work below. With
a strength which the sense of danger increased tenfold, he seized
one of the beams—the longest and heaviest; he pushed it out
through a loophole, then, grasping it again outside of the tower,
he made it slide along the angle of the balustrade which
surrounds the platform, and let it fly into the abyss. The
enormous timber, during that fall of a hundred and sixty feet,
scraping the wall, breaking the carvings, turned many times on
its centre, like the arm of a windmill flying off alone through
space. At last it reached the ground, the horrible cry arose, and
the black beam, as it rebounded from the pavement, resembled a
serpent leaping.

Quasimodo beheld the outcasts scatter at the fall of the beam,
like ashes at the breath of a child. He took advantage of their
fright, and while they were fixing a superstitious glance on the
club which had fallen from heaven, and while they were putting
out the eyes of the stone saints on the front with a discharge of
arrows and buckshot, Quasimodo was silently piling up plaster,
stones, and rough blocks of stone, even the sacks of tools
belonging to the masons, on the edge of the balustrade from which
the beam had already been hurled.

Thus, as soon as they began to batter the grand door, the shower
of rough blocks of stone began to fall, and it seemed to them
that the church itself was being demolished over their heads.

Any one who could have beheld Quasimodo at that moment would have
been frightened. Independently of the projectiles which he had
piled upon the balustrade, he had collected a heap of stones on
the platform itself. As fast as the blocks on the exterior edge
were exhausted, he drew on the heap. Then he stooped and rose,
stooped and rose again with incredible activity. His huge gnome’s
head bent over the balustrade, then an enormous stone fell, then
another, then another. From time to time, he followed a fine
stone with his eye, and when it did good execution, he said,
“Hum!”

Meanwhile, the beggars did not grow discouraged. The thick door
on which they were venting their fury had already trembled more
than twenty times beneath the weight of their oaken
battering-ram, multiplied by the strength of a hundred men. The
panels cracked, the carved work flew into splinters, the hinges,
at every blow, leaped from their pins, the planks yawned, the
wood crumbled to powder, ground between the iron sheathing.
Fortunately for Quasimodo, there was more iron than wood.

Nevertheless, he felt that the great door was yielding. Although
he did not hear it, every blow of the ram reverberated
simultaneously in the vaults of the church and within it. From
above he beheld the vagabonds, filled with triumph and rage,
shaking their fists at the gloomy façade; and both on the gypsy’s
account and his own he envied the wings of the owls which flitted
away above his head in flocks.

His shower of stone blocks was not sufficient to repel the
assailants.

At this moment of anguish, he noticed, a little lower down than
the balustrade whence he was crushing the thieves, two long stone
gutters which discharged immediately over the great door; the
internal orifice of these gutters terminated on the pavement of
the platform. An idea occurred to him; he ran in search of a
fagot in his bellringer’s den, placed on this fagot a great many
bundles of laths, and many rolls of lead, munitions which he had
not employed so far, and having arranged this pile in front of
the hole to the two gutters, he set it on fire with his lantern.

During this time, since the stones no longer fell, the outcasts
ceased to gaze into the air. The bandits, panting like a pack of
hounds who are forcing a boar into his lair, pressed tumultuously
round the great door, all disfigured by the battering ram, but
still standing. They were waiting with a quiver for the great
blow which should split it open. They vied with each other in
pressing as close as possible, in order to dash among the first,
when it should open, into that opulent cathedral, a vast
reservoir where the wealth of three centuries had been piled up.
They reminded each other with roars of exultation and greedy
lust, of the beautiful silver crosses, the fine copes of brocade,
the beautiful tombs of silver gilt, the great magnificences of
the choir, the dazzling festivals, the Christmasses sparkling
with torches, the Easters sparkling with sunshine,—all those
splendid solemneties wherein chandeliers, ciboriums, tabernacles,
and reliquaries, studded the altars with a crust of gold and
diamonds. Certainly, at that fine moment, thieves and pseudo
sufferers, doctors in stealing, and vagabonds, were thinking much
less of delivering the gypsy than of pillaging Notre-Dame. We
could even easily believe that for a goodly number among them la
Esmeralda was only a pretext, if thieves needed pretexts.

All at once, at the moment when they were grouping themselves
round the ram for a last effort, each one holding his breath and
stiffening his muscles in order to communicate all his force to
the decisive blow, a howl more frightful still than that which
had burst forth and expired beneath the beam, rose among them.
Those who did not cry out, those who were still alive, looked.
Two streams of melted lead were falling from the summit of the
edifice into the thickest of the rabble. That sea of men had just
sunk down beneath the boiling metal, which had made, at the two
points where it fell, two black and smoking holes in the crowd,
such as hot water would make in snow. Dying men, half consumed
and groaning with anguish, could be seen writhing there. Around
these two principal streams there were drops of that horrible
rain, which scattered over the assailants and entered their
skulls like gimlets of fire. It was a heavy fire which
overwhelmed these wretches with a thousand hailstones.

The outcry was heartrending. They fled pell-mell, hurling the
beam upon the bodies, the boldest as well as the most timid, and
the parvis was cleared a second time.

All eyes were raised to the top of the church. They beheld there
an extraordinary sight. On the crest of the highest gallery,
higher than the central rose window, there was a great flame
rising between the two towers with whirlwinds of sparks, a vast,
disordered, and furious flame, a tongue of which was borne into
the smoke by the wind, from time to time. Below that fire, below
the gloomy balustrade with its trefoils showing darkly against
its glare, two spouts with monster throats were vomiting forth
unceasingly that burning rain, whose silvery stream stood out
against the shadows of the lower façade. As they approached the
earth, these two jets of liquid lead spread out in sheaves, like
water springing from the thousand holes of a watering-pot. Above
the flame, the enormous towers, two sides of each of which were
visible in sharp outline, the one wholly black, the other wholly
red, seemed still more vast with all the immensity of the shadow
which they cast even to the sky.

Their innumerable sculptures of demons and dragons assumed a
lugubrious aspect. The restless light of the flame made them move
to the eye. There were griffins which had the air of laughing,
gargoyles which one fancied one heard yelping, salamanders which
puffed at the fire, tarasques[61] which sneezed in the smoke. And
among the monsters thus roused from their sleep of stone by this
flame, by this noise, there was one who walked about, and who was
seen, from time to time, to pass across the glowing face of the
pile, like a bat in front of a candle.

Without doubt, this strange beacon light would awaken far away,
the woodcutter of the hills of Bicêtre, terrified to behold the
gigantic shadow of the towers of Notre-Dame quivering over his
heaths.

A terrified silence ensued among the outcasts, during which
nothing was heard, but the cries of alarm of the canons shut up
in their cloister, and more uneasy than horses in a burning
stable, the furtive sound of windows hastily opened and still
more hastily closed, the internal hurly-burly of the houses and
of the Hôtel-Dieu, the wind in the flame, the last death-rattle
of the dying, and the continued crackling of the rain of lead
upon the pavement.

In the meanwhile, the principal vagabonds had retired beneath the
porch of the Gondelaurier mansion, and were holding a council of
war.

The Duke of Egypt, seated on a stone post, contemplated the
phantasmagorical bonfire, glowing at a height of two hundred feet
in the air, with religious terror. Clopin Trouillefou bit his
huge fists with rage.

“Impossible to get in!” he muttered between his teeth.

“An old, enchanted church!” grumbled the aged Bohemian, Mathias
Hungadi Spicali.

“By the Pope’s whiskers!” went on a sham soldier, who had once
been in service, “here are church gutters spitting melted lead at
you better than the machicolations of Lectoure.”

“Do you see that demon passing and repassing in front of the
fire?” exclaimed the Duke of Egypt.

“Pardieu, ’tis that damned bellringer, ’tis Quasimodo,” said
Clopin.

The Bohemian tossed his head. “I tell you, that ’tis the spirit
Sabnac, the grand marquis, the demon of fortifications. He has
the form of an armed soldier, the head of a lion. Sometimes he
rides a hideous horse. He changes men into stones, of which he
builds towers. He commands fifty legions ’Tis he indeed; I
recognize him. Sometimes he is clad in a handsome golden robe,
figured after the Turkish fashion.”

“Where is Bellevigne de l’Étoile?” demanded Clopin.

“He is dead.”

Andry the Red laughed in an idiotic way: “Notre-Dame is making
work for the hospital,” said he.

“Is there, then, no way of forcing this door,” exclaimed the King
of Thunes, stamping his foot.

The Duke of Egypt pointed sadly to the two streams of boiling
lead which did not cease to streak the black façade, like two
long distaffs of phosphorus.

“Churches have been known to defend themselves thus all by
themselves,” he remarked with a sigh. “Saint-Sophia at
Constantinople, forty years ago, hurled to the earth three times
in succession, the crescent of Mahom, by shaking her domes, which
are her heads. Guillaume de Paris, who built this one was a
magician.”

“Must we then retreat in pitiful fashion, like highwaymen?” said
Clopin. “Must we leave our sister here, whom those hooded wolves
will hang to-morrow.”

“And the sacristy, where there are wagon-loads of gold!” added a
vagabond, whose name, we regret to say, we do not know.

“Beard of Mahom!” cried Trouillefou.

“Let us make another trial,” resumed the vagabond.

Mathias Hungadi shook his head.

“We shall never get in by the door. We must find the defect in
the armor of the old fairy; a hole, a false postern, some joint
or other.”

“Who will go with me?” said Clopin. “I shall go at it again. By
the way, where is the little scholar Jehan, who is so encased in
iron?”

“He is dead, no doubt,” some one replied; “we no longer hear his
laugh.”

The King of Thunes frowned: “So much the worse. There was a brave
heart under that ironmongery. And Master Pierre Gringoire?”

“Captain Clopin,” said Andry the Red, “he slipped away before we
reached the Pont-aux-Changeurs.”

Clopin stamped his foot. “_Gueule-Dieu!_ ’twas he who pushed us
on hither, and he has deserted us in the very middle of the job!
Cowardly chatterer, with a slipper for a helmet!”

“Captain Clopin,” said Andry the Red, who was gazing down Rue du
Parvis, “yonder is the little scholar.”

“Praised be Pluto!” said Clopin. “But what the devil is he
dragging after him?”

It was, in fact, Jehan, who was running as fast as his heavy
outfit of a Paladin, and a long ladder which trailed on the
pavement, would permit, more breathless than an ant harnessed to
a blade of grass twenty times longer than itself.

“Victory! _Te Deum!_” cried the scholar. “Here is the ladder of
the longshoremen of Port Saint-Landry.”

Clopin approached him.

“Child, what do you mean to do, _corne-dieu!_ with this ladder?”

“I have it,” replied Jehan, panting. “I knew where it was under
the shed of the lieutenant’s house. There’s a wench there whom I
know, who thinks me as handsome as Cupido. I made use of her to
get the ladder, and I have the ladder, _Pasque-Mahom!_ The poor
girl came to open the door to me in her shift.”

“Yes,” said Clopin, “but what are you going to do with that
ladder?”

Jehan gazed at him with a malicious, knowing look, and cracked
his fingers like castanets. At that moment he was sublime. On his
head he wore one of those overloaded helmets of the fifteenth
century, which frightened the enemy with their fanciful crests.
His bristled with ten iron beaks, so that Jehan could have
disputed with Nestor’s Homeric vessel the redoubtable title of
δεκέμβολος.

“What do I mean to do with it, august king of Thunes? Do you see
that row of statues which have such idiotic expressions, yonder,
above the three portals?”

“Yes. Well?”

“’Tis the gallery of the kings of France.”

“What is that to me?” said Clopin.

“Wait! At the end of that gallery there is a door which is never
fastened otherwise than with a latch, and with this ladder I
ascend, and I am in the church.”

“Child let me be the first to ascend.”

“No, comrade, the ladder is mine. Come, you shall be the second.”

“May Beelzebub strangle you!” said surly Clopin, “I won’t be
second to anybody.”

“Then find a ladder, Clopin!”

Jehan set out on a run across the Place, dragging his ladder and
shouting: “Follow me, lads!”

In an instant the ladder was raised, and propped against the
balustrade of the lower gallery, above one of the lateral doors.
The throng of vagabonds, uttering loud acclamations, crowded to
its foot to ascend. But Jehan maintained his right, and was the
first to set foot on the rungs. The passage was tolerably long.
The gallery of the kings of France is to-day about sixty feet
above the pavement. The eleven steps of the flight before the
door, made it still higher. Jehan mounted slowly, a good deal
incommoded by his heavy armor, holding his crossbow in one hand,
and clinging to a rung with the other. When he reached the middle
of the ladder, he cast a melancholy glance at the poor dead
outcasts, with which the steps were strewn. “Alas!” said he,
“here is a heap of bodies worthy of the fifth book of the Iliad!”
Then he continued his ascent. The vagabonds followed him. There
was one on every rung. At the sight of this line of cuirassed
backs, undulating as they rose through the gloom, one would have
pronounced it a serpent with steel scales, which was raising
itself erect in front of the church. Jehan who formed the head,
and who was whistling, completed the illusion.

The scholar finally reached the balcony of the gallery, and
climbed over it nimbly, to the applause of the whole vagabond
tribe. Thus master of the citadel, he uttered a shout of joy, and
suddenly halted, petrified. He had just caught sight of Quasimodo
concealed in the dark, with flashing eye, behind one of the
statues of the kings.

Before a second assailant could gain a foothold on the gallery,
the formidable hunchback leaped to the head of the ladder,
without uttering a word, seized the ends of the two uprights with
his powerful hands, raised them, pushed them out from the wall,
balanced the long and pliant ladder, loaded with vagabonds from
top to bottom for a moment, in the midst of shrieks of anguish,
then suddenly, with superhuman force, hurled this cluster of men
backward into the Place. There was a moment when even the most
resolute trembled. The ladder, launched backwards, remained erect
and standing for an instant, and seemed to hesitate, then
wavered, then suddenly, describing a frightful arc of a circle
eighty feet in radius, crashed upon the pavement with its load of
ruffians, more rapidly than a drawbridge when its chains break.
There arose an immense imprecation, then all was still, and a few
mutilated wretches were seen, crawling over the heap of dead.

A sound of wrath and grief followed the first cries of triumph
among the besiegers. Quasimodo, impassive, with both elbows
propped on the balustrade, looked on. He had the air of an old,
bushy-headed king at his window.

As for Jehan Frollo, he was in a critical position. He found
himself in the gallery with the formidable bellringer, alone,
separated from his companions by a vertical wall eighty feet
high. While Quasimodo was dealing with the ladder, the scholar
had run to the postern which he believed to be open. It was not.
The deaf man had closed it behind him when he entered the
gallery. Jehan had then concealed himself behind a stone king,
not daring to breathe, and fixing upon the monstrous hunchback a
frightened gaze, like the man, who, when courting the wife of the
guardian of a menagerie, went one evening to a love rendezvous,
mistook the wall which he was to climb, and suddenly found
himself face to face with a white bear.

For the first few moments, the deaf man paid no heed to him; but
at last he turned his head, and suddenly straightened up. He had
just caught sight of the scholar.

Jehan prepared himself for a rough shock, but the deaf man
remained motionless; only he had turned towards the scholar and
was looking at him.

“Ho ho!” said Jehan, “what do you mean by staring at me with that
solitary and melancholy eye?”

As he spoke thus, the young scamp stealthily adjusted his
crossbow.

“Quasimodo!” he cried, “I am going to change your surname: you
shall be called the blind man.”

The shot sped. The feathered vireton[62] whizzed and entered the
hunchback’s left arm. Quasimodo appeared no more moved by it than
by a scratch to King Pharamond. He laid his hand on the arrow,
tore it from his arm, and tranquilly broke it across his big
knee; then he let the two pieces drop on the floor, rather than
threw them down. But Jehan had no opportunity to fire a second
time. The arrow broken, Quasimodo breathing heavily, bounded like
a grasshopper, and he fell upon the scholar, whose armor was
flattened against the wall by the blow.

Then in that gloom, wherein wavered the light of the torches, a
terrible thing was seen.

Quasimodo had grasped with his left hand the two arms of Jehan,
who did not offer any resistance, so thoroughly did he feel that
he was lost. With his right hand, the deaf man detached one by
one, in silence, with sinister slowness, all the pieces of his
armor, the sword, the daggers, the helmet, the cuirass, the leg
pieces. One would have said that it was a monkey taking the shell
from a nut. Quasimodo flung the scholar’s iron shell at his feet,
piece by piece. When the scholar beheld himself disarmed,
stripped, weak, and naked in those terrible hands, he made no
attempt to speak to the deaf man, but began to laugh audaciously
in his face, and to sing with his intrepid heedlessness of a
child of sixteen, the then popular ditty:—

“Elle est bien habillée,
La ville de Cambrai;
Marafin l’a pillée....”[63]

He did not finish. Quasimodo was seen on the parapet of the
gallery, holding the scholar by the feet with one hand and
whirling him over the abyss like a sling; then a sound like that
of a bony structure in contact with a wall was heard, and
something was seen to fall which halted a third of the way down
in its fall, on a projection in the architecture. It was a dead
body which remained hanging there, bent double, its loins broken,
its skull empty.

A cry of horror rose among the vagabonds.

“Vengeance!” shouted Clopin. “To the sack!” replied the
multitude. “Assault! assault!”

There came a tremendous howl, in which were mingled all tongues,
all dialects, all accents. The death of the poor scholar imparted
a furious ardor to that crowd. It was seized with shame, and the
wrath of having been held so long in check before a church by a
hunchback. Rage found ladders, multiplied the torches, and, at
the expiration of a few minutes, Quasimodo, in despair, beheld
that terrible ant heap mount on all sides to the assault of
Notre-Dame. Those who had no ladders had knotted ropes; those who
had no ropes climbed by the projections of the carvings. They
hung from each other’s rags. There were no means of resisting
that rising tide of frightful faces; rage made these fierce
countenances ruddy; their clayey brows were dripping with sweat;
their eyes darted lightnings; all these grimaces, all these
horrors laid siege to Quasimodo. One would have said that some
other church had despatched to the assault of Notre-Dame its
gorgons, its dogs, its drées, its demons, its most fantastic
sculptures. It was like a layer of living monsters on the stone
monsters of the façade.

Meanwhile, the Place was studded with a thousand torches. This
scene of confusion, till now hid in darkness, was suddenly
flooded with light. The parvis was resplendent, and cast a
radiance on the sky; the bonfire lighted on the lofty platform
was still burning, and illuminated the city far away. The
enormous silhouette of the two towers, projected afar on the
roofs of Paris, and formed a large notch of black in this light.
The city seemed to be aroused. Alarm bells wailed in the
distance. The vagabonds howled, panted, swore, climbed; and
Quasimodo, powerless against so many enemies, shuddering for the
gypsy, beholding the furious faces approaching ever nearer and
nearer to his gallery, entreated heaven for a miracle, and wrung
his arms in despair.